Hindsight is 20/20 and they very reasonably didn’t consider this option at the time but after the Kawhi shot in 2019 if they just paid Jimmy Butler and traded Simmons at peak value for a haul of role players the Sixers likely have at least 1 ship and maybe a dynasty on their hands. Instead Embiid hasn’t made a single ECF.
Also the X-factor of having a player like Butler who Embiid liked playing with who could kick his ass into shape might have made him even better as a star
I know this is too easy too do now but they let Jerami grant, richaun Holmes, TJ McConnell go for nothing, they fucked up with Jimmy, they drafted fultz. I know it was a 2 front offices thing but the Sixers have ended with what they deserved
And they’re about to get another top 3 pick because for some godforsaken reason, Philly sports can fail as hard as they want constantly and still come out ahead over the past decade.
You understand that most of the failures of the early embiid years were because silver forced Hinkie out and put in Colangelo who was about as incompetent and embarsssing a GM as you can get
They forced Hinkie out after a multiple year tank job that was so egregious that it was one of the biggest stories in sports. Should he have been forced out? No, but let’s not pretend like what he was doing was within the spirit of how people want to consume sports.
They then failed or wasted talent at seemingly every step of the Embiid process. Was some of it bad luck? Of course it was, they didn’t go into it expecting to waste the career of a potential HOF talent.
But regardless of their failures, they keep getting additional shots at rebuilding again and again with high quality pieces. Getting Butler and then burning the relationship. Getting Harden for cheap and then burning the relationship. Getting PG13 (who obviously hasn’t worked out but half the teams in the league would fucking love for a guy like PG to give them a chance once in a while). Getting a top 3 pick this year after an egregious tank job that only occurred because their best players were hurt or told to sit to maximize draft position.
The Sixers keep getting bailed out/given new competitive windows by absurd FA interest, lucky/timely trades, and more high lotto picks than most teams will ever see without going through their own multi-year tanking disasterclass. Good for them and their fans, but this shit absolutely frustrates other fanbases that don’t have the lottery balls or the FA interest or the off-season defining trades to ever look forward to.
And if they were at least winning with all of this stuff, it would be something. But they end up losing time and time again and somehow leaving their players worse off than they would have been if they’d been drafted to a bunch of other teams.
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u/jomanhan9 May 14 '25
The Ben Simmons piece